Hardwear
By Judith Broadhurst

The promise was that we'd be able to work whenever we wanted, from wherever we wanted. Instead, the expectation has become that we work all the time, from everywhere. How did we let that happen?

As the sea breeze gently blows his shirt open, the sound of the surf quietly beckons as he lounges on the deck of a beach house — and answers a cellular call from his office. Comfortably dressed in his Bermuda shorts, he's the embodiment of our fantasy of the freedom that technology gives us. Surely, it seems, whatever problem at work prompted the call is merely a momentary distraction from his languid life.

Contrast that alluring message, taken from a familiar AT&T television ad, to the real-life professor who makes herself available 16 hours a day, seven days a week, who doesn't cut off her cellular phone service until she undergoes major surgery, and who is back on the phone with a reporter a mere hour after arriving home. The difference between the two scenarios tells us most of what we need to know about the promises and perils that mobile technology lends our lives.

More than nine million of us have succumbed to the powerful temptations of portable office technologies. But instead of the freedom to work anytime, anywhere, we sometimes end up working all the time, everywhere. And it's not our employers or clients who pay the psychic price of instant availability. Too often, it is our personal family, and community lives that suffer the most.

Companies endorse mobile technology, and no wonder. Corporate downsizing over the last decade left many firms understaffed and expecting 60-hour work weeks from their remaining executives. According to the National outlook for Automation in the Home, a project funded by the National Science Foundation, people who have computers at home work more than twice the extra hours — an average of eight hours a week beyond their full week at the office — as those who do not have home PCs.

The study, conducted by Dr. Alladi Venkatesh of the Graduate School of Management and the School of Social Ecology at the University of California at Irvine and his former associate there, Nicholas Vitalari, also found that those who have telecommunications equipment - modems, fax machines, pagers, and cellular phones - worked 20 to 25 percent more hours on their own time than people who didn't have access to the technology.

The experience of the Rosen Law Firm, in Raleigh, NC, reflects the findings of this and other academic studies. The firm bought computers for each of its eight attorneys to use after work at home, to give them more flexible hours. "We've had an overall increase in billable hours of about 10 percent," says Lee Rosen, managing partner of the firm. "When you're talking about 150 hours per month at $150 per hour, that [extra 10 percent] pays for a computer in a month. From there, it's all gravy."

Advantages: "Crazy Wiring"

The technology can be an advantage for families and individuals in many ways, too. Children of single parents are glad that their parents are at least home, rather than at the office, even if they're tapping away at the keyboard past the kids' bedtimes.

Portable technology also gives people options they wouldn't have otherwise. It enabled Dr. Frank Meissner to accept the promotion to chief of cardiology at an Air Force medical center in California while his wife, Barbara, stayed in San Antonio, Texas, to finish her graduate work in archaeology. They communicate daily via e-mail, pagers, and online services. Without digital communication, Frank Meissner says he would not be able to maintain his relationships. "From my standpoint, because of the crazy wiring for the family," he says, "the effect of technology is to ameliorate the distance and to increase my own connection to those folks I care for."

Rather ironically, Professor Mark Schulman taught "The Philosophical Dilemmas of a Technological Society" by modem, even though his job as head of the Communications Department at The New School for Social Research [now New School University] in New York kept him traveling about half the time.

John Casamassina, vice president of operations for Cellular One in New York, even contends that being accessible all the time is good for your psyche. "You can know, right away, if that big real estate deal you're waiting for has closed or if that important customer has called you," he says. "That's far less stressful and more satisfying than not knowing."

Long before this kind of technology was available, studies repeatedly showed that having control over their work, including how and when they do it, makes people happier in their jobs than high salaries do. And many people report being more content now that they can go home earlier at night — even if they have to spend part of the evening working rather than watching TV (or doing something more active) with their families. They feel less frazzled working in their own places at their own paces.

Always Working

Alas, constraints of technology are seldom recognized by those who use it. "The people who walk around with beepers on their belts are tethered in a way that people didn't used to be," says Steve Nock, a sociologist at the University of Virginia. "But it's a different kind of connection. You're under the watchful eyes of people in a more direct way.

A'isha Ajayi, professor of information technology at the Rochester Institute of Technology, is a perfect example of someone who became seduced by the portable technology and let it take over her life. For a decade, she has made herself available from 10 a.m. to 2 a.m., seven days a week, wherever she goes. She's connected to a car phone, a cell phone, an alphanumeric pager, a standalone fax machine, and a phone at her office. At home, she has two phones, as well as both notebook and desktop computers equipped with modems and fax boards. She says that eating dinner at the computer has become a habit.

"It's almost indistinguishable when I'm home," she says. "I'm always working. I find it stressful and intrusive to be so on all the time. I started to realize that I'm becoming older and spending all my time working and attached to these devices and things."

So she swears she's trying to get a life again. Sure enough, anyone who called Ajayi's cellular phone number during one week in August heard, "The person at this number has disconnected the cellular phone." But it took undergoing major surgery that week to get her to disconnect, even temporarily. Within an hour of discharge from the hospital on Friday, she was returning calls and faxing memos from home, despite still feeling weak and groggy. By Sunday, she was doing a telephone interview for this story.

All the while, Ajayi keeps assuring herself that she really has changed her ways. She now declares "blackout time" after midnight and on weekends, and is especially proud of herself for actually taking a vacation last year without taking along any portable technology gadgets. Ajayi says she has really reformed and is no longer a techno junkie.

Ajayi is more loaded down with equipment than most, but she's closer to the norm, rather than the exception. According to a study conducted last year by American Demographics magazine, one-third of Americans do some work at home, even if their primary workplaces are elsewhere. The latest report from Link Resources, a market research firm based in New York, shows that one-third of American households now have a computer and that 75 percent of those are used for work. Of those doing corporate work after hours, 17 percent have fax devices and 25.6 percent have pagers. BIS Strategic Decisions, which tracks information technology, expects the number of computers used for office work at home to double to 3.2 million by 1997.

The Fax and the Fridge

Of course, people increasingly use computers, pagers, and even fax machines and cellular phones for personal reasons, too. Sharon Jenkins, vice president of Personal Communication Systems at Cellular One, says the trend is toward families using cellular phones so neither parents nor their children get stranded or in trouble.

Although he says he's not anti-tech, Nock, the sociologist from the University of Virginia, worries that we're not paying enough attention to the consequences of office technology tools. "People will trade almost anything for more time - income, prestige, power." The tradeoffs are costing us not only privacy, control over our lives, trust in one another, and effective relationships, but also are causing a gradual erosion of some of the norms that make society work, he says.

"What the fax machine does is what the refrigerator did," says Nock. "Before, you had to go out every single day or two days to get groceries. In the course of doing that, you interacted with a lot of people. The fax gives you a greater freedom and more time alone and with your family, so you have that time to use as you wish. But what kind of time is it buying you?

"I used to spend the time in my car with my wife, talking, so it was private time together. Once I [obtained] a cellular phone, we spent that time working, so we weren't really together," he says. "The fax machine has also intruded into the lives of families. It extends work into time and places that we didn't work before. It's not work that I used to do in the office, it's additional work."

The Insidious Nature of Workaholism

Another debit on the personal side of the balance sheet is workaholism, a rather insidious factor that is related to, but not caused by, technology. Remember what happened to A'isha Ajayi? Warning bells should go off in your head if you think you'll get more done or spend more time with your family if your company would only give you a pager or a fax machine to use at home.

"The hours are just the symptom, not the problem," says Barbara Killinger, a Toronto-based psychologist who wrote Workaholics: The Acceptable Addicts (Basic Books, 1991). It would take a separate article to list all the reasons and remedies for workaholism, but honest introspection about the real motivations behind the desire for all these gizmos is a good start. What's equally telling and compelling is Killinger's assessment of workaholism.

"The real problem of workaholics is an addiction to control and power," says Killinger. It's the flip side of enjoying your job because you have control over how you do it. But the obsession with either is ultimately a cover-up for fear. The traits at the root of those fears are perfectionism, guilt from an overdeveloped sense of responsibility, fear of incompetence or failure, feelings of persecution, and an inability or unwillingness to confront one's personal feelings.

At the office, the workaholic might manage to keep these tendencies in check. But when that same person starts working at home, after hours or otherwise, the problem can quickly slide out of control. "It's very hard to get peace and quiet at home, so they're very short-fused, very blunt and fire back at people if they're interrupted," says Killinger of people who refuse to turn off the computer. "What you'll see is this blurring of behavior. It will push the syndrome."

It may not be you who is the workaholic; it could be your boss. Consider it a red flag if it was your boss who insisted you set up the fax machine at home, order the pager, or install the modem. "Workaholics hire people whom they can manipulate," says Killinger. "They're such driven individuals that the only thing that matters is that they get this thing done so that they look successful out there. They'll phone people on holidays, because they don't care about anybody else's privacy or happiness. People are less important to them."

Paradox

Just as scary as the personal tradeoffs, says Nock, are the ramifications for our whole society. This technology creates a paradox, he says. The less employers are able to monitor us at work and keep tabs on us, the more they monitor us when we're not there. Of the broader implications, Nock says, "Sociologists tend to think that our behavior is strongly influenced by other people's expectations of us. That has a very strong influence on who you are and the way you act. When we start interacting with each other anonymously, there's much less of that social pressure.

"The social pressure is one of the things that people want to escape," he adds, "but that's part of what accounts for order and stability in our lives. We all tacitly or overtly agree to be subject to the same rules or laws or norms. If we start to sacrifice those, some of the basis for that trust and predictability gets eroded. ... If we're less and less exposed to one another, it's inevitable that we'll abide less and be less bound by common rules."

It is tempting to think of this techno-tether syndrome as a tyranny of the tools, but tools are only tools. They don't turn themselves on and off, and they certainly don't decide when the work is done. It's the people who use them who turn the tools into burdens rather than aids.

"We have universal phone service, lights, and the postal service," says Ajayi. "Those are utilities, and we don't think twice about them. We have a utility mentality that makes the technology out of our awareness, so we become dependent upon it without realizing it. It sucks you in.

"But we really have to understand it, rather than just be consumers, so we don't become enslaved. If you use technology strategically and take control of it, it can become a very positive thing in your life."

Published in Mobile Office magazine, December 1994
Copyright 1994 by Judith Broadhurst. All rights reserved.